01:26 pm - Why Labour should vote 'No'So; the ongoing context of what is happening in British politics is, that the Tories temporarily need the Lib Dems to shore up their programme of dismantling public services. The Lib Dems are doing this in return for the promise of a referendum on vote reform*. The dilemma for the Tories is that if the Lib Dems achieve vote reform it will be much harder to hold the coalition together, and certainly to whip up a vote for further more unpopular measures in the future.

The Tories want the referendum to fail - this is not a secret. They have tied vote reform to a second proposal, which they are (as discussed yesterday) explicitly framing around Westminster as 'We will shaft the Labour party by fixing boundaries'. Why are they being so blatant about this cunning plan? Obviously, because a negative reaction is what they want. They want to sabotage the AV referendum, so they are tying it to something they are explicitly framing as a partisan land-grab. (ETA - this tying together is in the framing of the legislation to allow the referendum to happen).

It's as if the Tories tied vote reform to a granny-punching proposal or something. If the bill is on a joint proposal to bring in AV and cut the number of seats in poor areas, then Labour MPs will vote against it. Meanwhile many Tory MPs will oppose the AV bit of the yoked pair. The Tories know this and they consider it worth it to sabotage the Bill which they want to fail.

I honestly expected the Lib Dems to play more clever, to make it easier for people like me to give them qualified support.

ETA - in my first wording of this post I thought I would be given a say on both proposals, and added 'Perhaps they don't want my vote in the referendum, in which case, fine.' I should more accurately have said 'Perhaps they don't want Labour MPs support, and feel they can win without it, and we shall see.'

*of course this all leaves out the Lib Dems who love what the Tories are doing, don't need any persuasion and will probably join a reformed Tory party soon

Comments:

My understanding is that the bill will change the size of the boundaries and cause the referendum. The referendum itself will be purely on AV - and the question has already been announced:"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

"Instead of introducing a separate bill on the alternative vote referendum which would have been supported by Labour in a vote through parliament, the government has spatchcocked it together with the most blatant gerrymander of parliamentary constituency boundaries since the days of the rotten boroughs."

So they are hoping to sabotage it at Bill level, even before it can get to referendum.

Which is a bit daft to my mind, as they'd vote for it in a separate Bill, whereas LAbour would back a separate AV bill. There's got to be some tactical reason to put it all into one Bill, we shall see.

The other thing about this is that nobody really knows what the effect of AV would actually be. If anybody has a link to a realistic study or similar real-world example from another country that made the switch, I'd love to see it.

We do know that it is not proportional, and it can actually magnify the effect of landslides. In the 1997 election it would probably have given Blair an even bigger majority. In the 2010 election it would probably have levelled the playing field a bit and helped the Lib Dems. In combination with massive gerrymandering, god knows. The effects might be so dramatic as to make granny-punching look like pat-a-cake.

I think the idea that the boundary reforms/reduction in constituencies is a gerrymander of any sort is pure Labour spin and propaganda. Yes, it's not good for Labour - but that's because the current constituency system is massively biased in Labour's favour by having a large number of seats with less population in areas that traditionally vote Labour. If you think that's fair, fine, but you need to make the case for why you think certain areas should have smaller (by population) constituencies than others, and thus why certain people's votes should count for more than others.